The Snow Queen Read Online Free Page B

pedestal sink and a toilet that actually still dangles a pull-chain flush from its tank. The bathroom is a chamber of unmolested oldness, the only place in which to escape the on-the-cheap improvements wrought by renters who’d hoped to brighten things up a bit, who’d imagined that the hibiscus-patterned contact paper affixed to the kitchen counters, or the word “Suerte” inexpertly carved into the lintel, would help make them feel more at home, in this apartment and in the larger world; and who, all of them, have either moved on by now, or died.
    Barrett is in the tub. There’s no denying his capacity for a certain comic grandeur; a pride of being he carries with him everywhere; something royal, something that can in all likelihood only be inherited, never constructed or feigned. Barrett doesn’t lie in the tub. He sits straight-backed, blank-faced, like a commuter going home on a train.
    He asks Tyler, “What are you doing up?”
    Tyler takes a cigarette from the pack he keeps in the medicine cabinet. He doesn’t smoke anywhere but in the bathroom, for Beth’s sake.
    “We left the window open last night. Our bedroom is full of snow.”
    He taps the pack, violently, before extracting a cigarette. He’s not entirely sure why people do that (to concentrate the tobacco?), but he likes doing it, he likes that one sure and punishing
whack
as part of the lighting-up ritual.
    Barrett says, “Dreams?”
    Tyler lights his cigarette. He goes to the window, cracks it open, blows the smokestream out into the air shaft. His exhalation is answered by a tickle of frigid air, seeping in.
    “Some windy joy,” he answers. “No specifics. Weather as happiness, but gritty, happiness blowing in unwanted, maybe in a town in Latin America. You?”
    “A statue with a hard-on,” Barrett says. “A skulking dog. I’m afraid that’s it.”
    They pause as if they were scientists, taking notes.
    Barrett asks, “Have you listened to the news yet?”
    “No. I’m a little bit afraid to.”
    “He was still ahead in the polls at six.”
    “He’s not going to win,” Tyler says. “I mean,
there were no fucking weapons of mass destruction
. Zero. Zip.”
    Barrett’s attention is briefly diverted by a search, among the shampoo bottles, for one that still contains shampoo. Which is just as well. Tyler knows he can get crazy on the subject, monomaniacal; he can be tiresome about his conviction that if others only
saw
, if they only
understood
…
    There were no weapons of mass destruction.
And we bombed them anyway.
    And, by the way, he’s destroyed the economy. He’s squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.
    It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane. And now that he’s no longer looking out onto his private snow kingdom, now that he’s coked himself up from that languid, awake-too-early state, he’s not only alert as a rabbit, he’s also available, once again, to the forces of fretfulness and dread.
    He blows another plume out into the inrushing cold, watches his furls of smoke evaporate in the falling snow.
    Barrett says, “What I’m really worried about is Kerry’s haircut.”
    Tyler shuts his eyes, wincingly, as he would at the onset of a headache. He does not want to be, will not be, the one who won’t tolerate a joke, the uncle who has to be invited at the holidays even though we all know how he’s going to carry on about … whatever injustice or betrayal or historical malfeasance he wears like a suit of iron, soldered to his body.
    “What I’m worried about,” Tyler says, “is Ohio.”
    “I think it’ll be all right,” Barrett answers. “I have a feeling. Or, well, I have hope.”
    He has hope. Hope is an old jester’s cap by now. Faded motley, with that little tin bell at the tip. Who has the energy to wear it anymore? But who’s courageous enough to doff it, leave it crumpled in the lane? Not Tyler.
    “I do too,” he says. “I have hope and